Tuesday, March 23, 2010

This was the theme of our regular Monday evening sketch group. KKG is doing an awesome job changing up the topics. Its great to see artists that I work with evey day coming up with ideas that are way out of their comfort zone. Im trying to avoid erasing or undoing in Photoshop so I want to get in the same mindset with a pencil. Keep it loose and incorporate your mistakes into the sketch. Its a challenge, but its always fun and it keeps me out of detail mode.

Sketch groups are fun and great practice. If your not in one, start it up! Or if you have access to a sketch group and just refuse to use it, you suk! Thats right, I'm calling you out Platinum Pat! =)

Sunday, March 14, 2010

I'm getting back into speed painting for practice. For this one I referenced some mountain pics I took from our snow trip last month. The focus was shapes, values and time management. I set the timer for 1 hr. Once I had a blockout with nice clear shapes and decent composition, I looked up at the clock and it says 20 min. "Sweet! I still have 40 min to make it look cool!" says me. So I start pushing around diagonal snow shapes to break up the vertical stones and trees, pushing contrast in the foreground, etc. All good stuff. But at some point the detail switch in my head flips on and speed paintings arch nemesis, noodler guy shows up to crash the party. I hear the BEEP! and instantly snap out of the zone. "Oh shit, times up..." I hesitate for a moment and then struggle to put the pen down. I take a deep breath then zoom out... FAIL. The shapes and values started blending back together. I got hung up on details and ran out of time which ended up hurting the final image. In retrospect I should have saved an iteration at 20 min to show the difference. With another 10 min, I could greatly improve this image with a lighting and base snow fixing pass. Sometimes its just better to fail and leave it to remind yourself what not to do next time. =)